The travel industry includes many different segments of travel providers. Some examples of travel industry segments include airlines, hotels, car rental companies, activity providers, insurance providers, and the like. Each of the travel providers in these industry segments may typically offer multiple different products and/or services to their customers—e.g., hotels may offer many different types of rooms, car rental companies may provide several different classes or types of cars, etc.
Oftentimes, a customer purchasing one travel-related product may be interested in purchasing additional related products or services. For example, when a customer purchases a flight for a business trip, the customer might also need a hotel room at the travel destination and/or a rental car during the trip. Rather than dealing with each of the travel providers individually, customers may prefer a one-stop shopping experience that allows them to purchase the travel products using a single interface.
This one-stop shopping experience may be provided, for example, via travel consolidators that aggregate different products from different travel providers and segments, or via provider alliances who have agreed to work with one another to allow access to each others' reservation systems. However, setting up either of these options may involve significant integration efforts on the part of the travel providers or consolidators because each of the different travel providers may have their own interfaces and product models that are specific to their particular business. As such, even relatively minor changes in product definitions or interfaces may result in a substantial amount of work to ensure that all of the various components are able to properly communicate with one another in a language that both sides can understand.